This week marks E3 2013, one of the year’s biggest gaming conferences, which included more information about what we can expect to see from the industry in the next year-or-so. With all of this going on, I thought I would sound off about some of these announcements and ask quite an important question: do we really want or need a new console generation?… Read more
The XBOX ONE Reveal
Well, Microsoft has finally unveiled their next games console: the XBOX ONE (which has already earned various nicknames, perhaps the most flattering of which is the X-Bone). The pretentiously named console, which resembles the monolith from the movie 2001, was revealed at a Microsoft press conference yesterday. I thought I’d throw my opinions into the ring and comment on the general reaction of the internet so far.… Read more
Open-World Games
Lots of video games these days feature some sort of open world, or at least places that you can explore for hidden rewards and the occasional side story. Only a few games, however, seem to integrate these mechanisms properly into the wider game. So, I thought that for my latest rant I would talk about these often arbitrary and pointless features and about one of the few games I can think of that makes good use of them.… Read more
Review – Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm
It’s been nearly three years since Starcraft 2 – Wings of Liberty was finally released. It was the sequel to a game that is one of the best-selling and most critically-acclaimed strategy games of all time and a personal favourite of mine. It was also a sequel that, itself, was released a whole 12 years after the original game. Blizzard certainly like to take their sweet time with these things, but it is usually worth the wait. The first part … Read more
Review: Tomb Raider
Just to be clear, I’m talking about the 2013 reboot/origin story ‘Tomb Raider’, not the 1996 game! I realise that doing this is something of a trend at the minute, but quite why they couldn’t have called it ‘Tomb Raider: Origins’ or ‘Tomb Raider: The Dragon’s Triangle’ or something is beyond me. Anyway, I have just completed the new game on the Xbox 360 and thought I would offer my opinions…… Read more
Writing: Working with Wikis
As part of the process of creating the world for my story, I was working on a mini-website called the Databank, which contained information about the characters and the world. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was difficult to maintain and ultimately fell by the wayside. However, I recently returned to the idea and explored a different solution that has been incredibly helpful to me, so I thought I would share it with you.… Read more
Mass Effect 3: The Ending & Extended Cut
The Mass Effect Trilogy recently came to an end with, you guessed it, Mass Effect 3. It should be pointed out that it is one of my favourite game series of all time and that the final game was suitably epic and brilliant… but then there was the ending. Now, I’m going to try and avoid the same raging that most of the fans have been doing and offer a more constructive opinion. The free ‘Extended Cut’ DLC is now … Read more
Free-to-Play Games
I have spent a lot of the last few weeks trying out some of the ‘free-to-play’ games that are now available on Steam. I’d like to share some of my ideas and opinions about these….… Read more
Boss Fights
Boss fights are a common element of most games, but are something that I frequently find frustrating. I’d like to take a moment to look at some great (and truly terrible) boss fights to look at how they should be done.
… Read moreSonic 4 vs Sonic Generations
I’ve already talked about Sonic recently in my Retrospective, but that was before I had properly played either Sonic 4 – Episode 1 or Sonic Generations. Both of these games seem to be trying to shed some of the stuff that has made the recent games so bad and trying to take Sonic back to his roots, but have either of them succeeded? Lets find out…
Assassins Creed Restrospective
The Assassins Creed (should there be an apostrophe in there somewhere?) series, while doing nothing for the reputation of hoodies, has become one of the most popular series of the current generation and some of my favourite games… in some ways. I haven’t reviewed any of the games yet, so I thought I would take a look back at the series and offer some opinions.
Writing – Introduction
OK, this blog entry is a bit different. I thought I would share some of my experience of attempting to write a series of novels and short stories. I will probably write a few entries on this subject every-so-often with updates on my progress, but for now I’d like to share some of my experiences, resources I’ve found useful and some of the key things I’ve learnt along the way.… Read more